Posts tagged with 'phone'

I already blogged about the help app I was working on a bit in the last time. I wanted to go into a bit more detail now that we reached a new milestone.

What’s the idea behind it?

In a conversation in the Community team we noticed that there’s a lot of knowledge we gathered in the course of having used Ubuntu on a phone for a long time and that it might make sense to share tips and tricks, FAQ, suggestions and lots more with new device users in a simple way.

The idea was to share things like “here’s how to use edge swipes to do X” (maybe an animated GIF?) and “if you want to do Y, install the Z app from the store” in an organised and clever fashion. Obviously we would want this to be easily editable (Markdown) and have easy translations (Launchpad), work well on the phone (Ubuntu HTML5 UI toolkit) and work well on the web (Ubuntu Design Web guidelines) too.

What’s the state of things now?

There’s not much content yet and it doesn’t look perfect, but we have all the infrastructure set up. You can now start contributing!

screenshot of web edition
screenshot of phone app edition

What’s still left to be done?

We need HTML/CSS gurus who can help beautifying the themes.

We need people to share their tips and tricks and favourite bits of their Ubuntu devices experience.

We’ve come a long way in the last week and with the easy of Markdown text and easy Launchpad translations, we should quickly be in a state where we can offer this in the Ubuntu software store and publish the content on the web as well.

If you want to write some content, translate, beautify or fix a few bugs, your help is going to be appreciated. Just ping myself, Nick Skaggs or David Planella on #ubuntu-app-devel.

In a recent conversation we thought it’d be a good idea to share tips and tricks, suggestions and ideas with users of Ubuntu devices. Because it’d help to have it available immediately on the phone, an app could be a good idea.

I had a quick look at it and after some discussion with Rouven in my office space, it looked like hyde could fit the bill nicely. To edit the content, just write a bit of Markdown, generate the HTML (nice and readable templates – great!) and done.

Unfortunately I’m not a CSS or HTML wizard, so if you could help out making it more Ubuntu-y, that’d be great! Also: if you’re interested in adding content, that’d be great.

Just a quick note to tell you that I have published a new scope called uBrick that brings you the awesomeness of Lego, as a catalogue powered by brickset.com, directly to your Ubuntu phone home screen.

I wrote the scope in Go cause I find it easier to work with for a quick scope ( took about 8 hours with interruptions over 2 days to write this scope). The scope is now available at the store, just search for uBrick.

Here are some pics:

Also I have to congratulate the folks at Brickset for a very nice API, even if it is using SOAP :)

Today marks 10 years of Ubuntu and the release of the 21st version. That is an incredible milestone and one which is worthy of reflection and celebration. I am fortunate enough to be spending the day at our devices sprint with 200+ of the folks that have helped make this possible. There are of course hundreds of others in Canonical and thousands in the community who have helped as well. The atmosphere here includes a lot of reminiscing about the early days and re-telling of the funny stories, and there is a palpable excitement in the air about the future. That same excitement was present at a Canonical Cloud Summit in Brussels last week.

The team here is closing in on shipping our first phone, marking a new era in Ubuntu’s history. There has been excellent work recently to close bugs and improve quality, and our partner BQ is as pleased with the results as we are. We are on the home stretch to this milestone, and are still on track to have Ubuntu phones in the market this year. Further, there is an impressive array of further announcements and phones lined up for 2015.

But of course that’s not all we do – the Ubuntu team and community continue to put out rock solid, high quality Ubuntu desktop releases like clockwork – the 21st of which will be released today. And with the same precision, our PC OEM team continues to make that great work available on a pre-installed basis on millions of PCs across hundreds of machine configurations. That’s an unparalleled achievement, and we really have changed the landscape of Linux and open source over the last decade. The impact of Ubuntu can be seen in countless ways – from the individuals, schools, and enterprises who now use Ubuntu; to proliferation of Codes of Conduct in open source communities; to the acceptance of faster (and near continuous) release cycles for operating systems; to the unique company/community collaboration that makes Ubuntu possible; to the vast number of developers who have now grown up with Ubuntu and in an open source world; to the many, many, many technical innovations to come out of Ubuntu, from single-CD installation in years past to the more recent work on image-based updates.

Ubuntu Server also sprang from our early desktop roots, and has now grown into the leading solution for scale out computing. Ubuntu and our suite of cloud products and services is the premier choice for any customer or partner looking to operate at scale, and it is indeed a “scale-out” world. From easy to consume Ubuntu images on public clouds; to managed cloud infrastructure via BootStack; to standard on-premise, self-managed clouds via Ubuntu OpenStack; to instant solutions delivered on any substrate via Juju, we are the leaders in a highly competitive, dynamic space. The agility, reliability and superior execution that have brought us to today’s milestone remains a critical competency for our cloud team. And as we release Ubuntu 14.10 today, which includes the latest OpenStack, new versions of our tooling such as MaaS and Juju, and initial versions of scale-out solutions for big data and Cloud Foundry, we build on a ten year history of “firsts”.

All Ubuntu releases seem to have their own personality, and Utopic is a fitting way to commemorate the realisation of a decade of vision, hard work and collaboration. We are poised on the edge of a very different decade in Canonical’s history, one in which we’ll carry forward the applicable successes and patterns, but will also forge a new path in the twin worlds of converged devices and scale-out computing. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the journey thus far. Now, on to Vivid and the next ten years!

This is a guest post from Will Cooke, the new Desktop Team manager at Canonical. It’s being posted here while we work to get a blog setup on unity.ubuntu.com, which is where you can find out more about Unity 8 and how to get involved with it.

Intro

Understandably, most of the Ubuntu news recently has focused around phones. There is a lot of excitement and anticipation building around the imminent release of the first devices. However, the Ubuntu Desktop has not been dormant during this time. A lot of thought and planning has been given to what the desktop will become in the future; who will use it and what will they use it for. All the work which is going in to the phone will be directly applicable to the desktop as well, since they will use the same code. All the apps, the UI tweaks, everything which makes applications secure and stable will all directly apply to the desktop as well. The plan is to have the single converged operating system ready for use on the desktop by 16.04.

The plan

We learned some lessons during the early development of Unity 7. Here’s what happened:

11.04: New Unity as default

11.10: New Unity version

12.04: Unity in First LTS

What we’ve decided to do this time is to keep the same, stable Unity 7 desktop as the default while we offer users who want to opt-in to Unity8 an option to use that desktop. As development continues the Unity 8 desktop will get better and better. It will benefit from a lot of the advances which have come about through the development of the phone OS and will benefit from continual improvements as the releases happen.

14.04 LTS: Unity 7 default / Unity 8 option for the first time

14.10: Unity 7 default / Unity 8 new rev as an option

15.04: Unity 7 default / Unity 8 new rev as an option

15.10: Potentially Unity 8 default / Unity 7 as an option

16.04 LTS: Unity 8 default / Unity 7 as an option

As you can see, this gives us a full 2 cycles (in addition to the one we’ve already done) to really nail Unity 8 with the level of quality that people expect. So what do we have?

How will we deliver Unity 8 with better quality than 7?

Continuous Integration is the best way for us to achieve and maintain the highest quality possible. We have put a lot of effort in to automating as much of the testing as we can, the best testing is that which is performed easily. Before every commit the changes get reviewed and approved – this is the first line of defense against bugs. Every merge request triggers a run of the tests, the second line of defense against bugs and regressions – if a change broke something we find out about it before it gets in to the build.

The CI process builds everything in a “silo”, a self contained & controlled environment where we find out if everything works together before finally landing in the image.

And finally, we have a large number of tests which run against those images. This really is a “belt and braces” approach to software quality and it all happens automatically. You can see, we are taking the quality of our software very seriously.

What about Unity 7?

Unity 7 and Compiz have a team dedicated to maintenance and bug fixes and so the quality of it continues to improve with every release. For example; windows switching workspaces when a monitor gets unplugged is fixed, if you have a mouse with 6 buttons it works, support for the new version of Metacity (incase you want to use the Gnome2 desktop) – added (and incidentally, a lot of that work was done by a community contributor – thanks Alberts!)

Unity 7 is the desktop environment for a lot of software developers, devops gurus, cloud platform managers and millions of users who rely on it to help them with their everyday computing. We don’t want to stop you being able to get work done. This is why we continue to maintain Unity 7 while we develop Unity 8. If you want to take Unity 8 for a spin and see how its coming along then you can; if you want to get your work done, we’re making that experience better for you every day. Best of all, both of these options are available to you with no detriment to the other.

Things that we’re getting in the new Ubuntu Desktop

Applications decoupled from the OS updates. Traditionally a given release of Ubuntu has shipped with the versions of the applications available at the time of release. Important updates and security fixes are back-ported to older releases where required, but generally you had to wait for the next release to get the latest and greatest set of applications. The new desktop packaging system means that application developers can push updates out when they are ready and the user can benefit right away.

Application isolation. Traditionally applications can access anything the user can access; photos, documents, hardware devices, etc. On other platforms this has led to data being stolen or rendered otherwise unusable. Isolation means that without explicit permission any Click packaged application is prevented from accessing data you don’t want it to access.

A full SDK for writing Ubuntu apps. The SDK which many people are already using to write apps for the phone will allow you to write apps for the desktop as well. In fact, your apps will be write once run anywhere – you don’t need to write a “desktop” app or a “phone” app, just an Ubuntu app.

What we have now

The easiest way to try out the Unity 8 Desktop Preview is to use the daily Ubuntu Desktop Next live image: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-desktop-next/daily-live/current/ This will allow you to boot into a Unity 8 session without touching your current installation. An easy 10 step way to write this image to a USB stick is:

Download the ISO

Insert your USB stick in the knowledge that it’s going to get wiped

Open the “Disks” application

Choose your USB stick and click on the cog icon on the righthand side

Choose “Restore Disk Image”

Browse to and select the ISO you downloaded in #1

Click “Start restoring”

Wait

Boot and select “Try Ubuntu….”

Done *

* Please note – there is currently a bug affecting the Unity 8 greeter which means you are not automatically logged in when you boot the live image. To log in you need to:

Switch to vt1 (ctrl-alt-f1)

type “passwd” and press enter

press enter again to set the current password to blank

enter a new password twice

Check that the password has been successfully changed

Switch back to vt7 (ctrl-alt-f7)

Enter the new password to login

Here are some screenshots showing what Unity 8 currently looks like on the desktop:

The team

The people working on the new desktop are made up of a few different disciplines. We have a team dedicated to Unity 7 maintenance and bug fixes who are also responsible for Unity 8 on the desktop and feed in a lot of support to the main Unity 8 & Mir teams. We have the Ubuntu Desktop team who are responsible for many aspects of the underlying technologies used such as GNOME libraries, settings, printing etc as well as the key desktop applications such as Libreoffice and Chromium. The Ubuntu desktop team has some of the longest serving members of the Ubuntu family, with some people having been here for the best part of ten years.

How you can help

We need to log all the bugs which need to be fixed in order to make Unity 8 the best desktop there is. Firstly, we need people to test the images and log bugs. If developers want to help fix those bugs, so much the better. Right now we are focusing on identifying where the work done for the phone doesn’t work as expected on the desktop. Once those bugs are logged and fixed we can rely on the CI system described above to make sure that they stay fixed.

So it’s finally happened, one of my first Ubuntu SDK apps has reached an official 1.0 release. And I think we all know what that means. Yup, it’s time to scrap the code and start over.

It’s a well established mantra, codified by Fred Brooks, in software development that you will end up throwing away the first attempt at a new project. The releases between 0.1 and 0.9 are a written history of your education about the problem, the tools, or the language you are learning. And learn I did, I wrote a whole series of posts about my adventures in writing uReadIt. Now it’s time to put all of that learning to good use.

Often times projects still spend an extremely long time in this 0.x stage, getting ever closer but never reaching that 1.0 release. This isn’t because they think 1.0 should wait until the codebase is perfect, I don’t think anybody expects 1.0 to be perfect. 1.0 isn’t the milestone of success, it’s the crossing of the Rubicon, the point where drastic change becomes inevitable. It’s the milestone where the old code, with all it’s faults, dies, and out of it is born a new codebase.

So now I’m going to start on uReadIt 2.0, starting fresh, with the latest Ubuntu UI Toolkit and platform APIs. It won’t be just a feature-for-feature rewrite either, I plan to make this a great Reddit client for both the phone and desktop user. To that end, I plan to add the following:

A full Javascript library for interacting with the Reddit API

User account support, which additionally will allow:

Posting articles & comments

Reading messages in your inbox

Upvoting and downvoting articles and comments

Convergence from the start, so it’s usable on the desktop as well

Re-introduce link sharing via Content-Hub

Take advantage of new features in the UITK such as UbuntuListView filtering & pull-to-refresh, and left/right swipe gestures on ListItems

Another change, which I talked about in a previous post, will be to the license of the application. Where uReadIt 1.0 is GPLv3, the next release will be under a BSD license.

I was watching the iPhone 6 launch last night and was wonder what the fuss is all about? Well it’s from Apple and people may be drooling.

Lets find out how the iPhone 6 compares with the Leading Android phones. I am only comparing the specifications and features and not the actually quality which is very subjective.

Here is Apple iPhone vs Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8 and Xiaomi MI3. Galaxy S5 and One M8 are the premium Android phones while the MI3 is the poor man’s option or the rich mans budget phone which ever way you look at it.

Features

iPhone 6

Galaxy S5

One M8

MI3

FingerPrint Sensor

Yes

Yes

No

No

Dust Resistant

No

Yes

No

No

Water Resistant

No

Yes

No

No

Screen Size

4.7″

5.1″

5.0″

5.0″

Resolution

750 x 1334

1080 x 1920

1080 x 1920

1080 x 1920

Full HD

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

RAM

1 GB

2 GB

2 GB

2 GB

Memory Card Slot

No

Yes

Yes

No

Primary Camera

8 MP

16 MP

Dual 4MP

13 MP

Selfie Camera

1.2 MP

2 MP

5MP

2MP

CPU

Dual-core
1.4 GHz

Quad-core 2.5 GHz

Quad-core 2.3/2.5 GHz

Quad-core
2.3 GHz

FM Radio

No

No

Yes

Yes

4G LTE

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

As you can see the Android variants are leading in almost all the specifications which does matter. This includes the inexpensive Xiaomi Rather than innovating, Apple seems to only playing catch-up. Apply skillfully hides the finer specifications. Its your choice to stand in the queue for iPhone 6 or go with an Android at a cheaper price.

It was less than a month that we announced crossing the 10,000 users milestone for Ubuntu phones and tablets, and we’ve already reached another: 100,000 app downloads!

Downloads

The new Ubuntu store used by phones, tablets, and soon the desktop as well, provides app developers with some useful statistics about how many times their app was downloaded, which version was downloaded, and what country the download originated from. This is very useful as it it lets the developer gauge how many users they currently have for their app, and how quickly they are updating to new versions. One side-effect of these statistics is that we can see how many total downloads there have been across all of the apps in the store, and this week we reached (and quickly passed) the 100,000th download.

Users

We’re getting close to having Ubuntu phones go on sale from our partners at Bq and Meizu, but there are still no devices on the market that came with Ubuntu. This means that we’ve reached this milestone solely from developers and enthusiasts who have installed Ubuntu on one of their own devices (probably a Nexus device) or the device emulator.

The continued growth in the download number validates the earlier milestone of 10,000 users, a large number of them are clearly still using Ubuntu on their device (or emulator) and keeping their apps up to date (the number represents new app installs and updates). This means that not only are people trying Ubuntu already, many of them are sticking with it too. Yet another datapoint in support of this is the 600 new unique users who have been using the store since the last milestone announcement.

Pioneers

To supply all of these users with the apps they want, we’re continuing to build our community of app developers around Ubuntu. The first of these have already received their limited edition t-shirts, and are listed on the Ubuntu Pioneers page of the developer portal.

There is still time to get your app published, and claim your place on that page and your t-shirt, but they’re filling up fast so don’t delay. Go to our Developer Portal and get started today, you could be only a few hours away from publishing your first app in the store!

As we enter the final months before the first Ubuntu phones ship from our partners Meizu and Bq, the numbers of apps, users and downloads continues to grow at a steady pace. Today I’m excited to announce that we have more than ten thousand unique users of Ubuntu on phones or tablets!

Users

Ubuntu phone (and tablet) users sign into their Ubuntu One account on their device in order to download or update the applications on their phone. This allows us to provide many useful features that users expect coming from Android or iOS, such as being able to re-install their collection of apps on a new phone or after resetting their current one, or browsing the store’s website (coming soon) and having the option to install an app directly to their device from there. As a side effect, it means we know how many unique Ubuntu One accounts have connected to the store to in order to download an app, and that number has this week passed the 10,000 mark.

Excitement

Not only is this a milestone, but it’s down right amazing when you consider that there are currently no phones available to purchase with Ubuntu on them. The first phones from OEMs will be shipping later this year, but for now there isn’t a phone or tablet that comes with the new Ubuntu device OS on it. That means that each of these 10,000 people have purchased (or already had) either a supported Nexus device, or are using one of the community ports, and either wiped Android off them in favor of Ubuntu, or are dual booting. If this many people are willing to install the beta release of Ubuntu phone on their device, just imagine how many more will want to purchase a phone with Ubuntu pre-installed and with full support from the manufacturer.

Pioneers

In addition to users of Ubuntu phone, we’ve also seen a steady growth in the number of applications and application developers targeting Ubuntu phone and using the Ubuntu SDK. To celebrate them, we created Ubuntu App Pioneers page, and the first batch of Pioneers t-shirts are being sent out to those intrepid developers who, again, are so excited about a platform that isn’t even available to consumers yet that they’ve dedicated their time and energy into making it better for everyone.

Following the initial announcement, the Ubuntu emulator is going to become a primary Engineering platform for development. Quoting Alexander Sack, when ready, the goal is to

[…] start using the emulator for everything you usually would do on the phone. We really want to make the emulator a class A engineering platform for everyone

While the final emulator is still work in progress, we’re continually seeing the improvements in finishing all the pieces to make it a first-class citizen for development, both for the platform itself and for app developers. However, as it stands today, the emulator is already functional, so I’ve decided to prepare a quickstart guide to highlight the great work the Foundations and Phonedations teams (along with many other contributors) are producing to make it possible.

While you should consider this as guide as a preview, you can already use it to start getting familiar with the emulator for testing, platform development and writing apps.

Requirements

To install and run the Ubuntu emulator, you will need:

Ubuntu 14.04 or later (see installation notes for older versions)

512MB of RAM dedicated to the emulator

4GB of disk space

OpenGL-capable desktop drivers (most graphics drivers/cards are)

Installing the emulator

If you are using Ubuntu 14.04, installation is as easy as opening a terminal, pressing Ctrl+Alt+T and running these commands, followed by Enter:

Scroll down to Trusty Tahr and click on the arrow to the left to expand it

Scroll further to the bottom of the page and click on the MARKDOWN_HASH05556613978ce6821766bb234e2ff0f2MARKDOWN_HASH package corresponding to your architecture (i386 or amd64) to download in the MARKDOWN_HASH1e681dc9c2bfe6538971553668079349MARKDOWN_HASH folder you created

Scroll down to Trusty Tahr and click on the arrow to the left to expand it

Scroll further to the bottom of the page and click on the MARKDOWN_HASH1843750ed619186a2ce7bdabba6f8062MARKDOWN_HASH package corresponding to download it at the same MARKDOWN_HASH1e681dc9c2bfe6538971553668079349MARKDOWN_HASH folder

Open a terminal with Ctrl+Alt+T

Change the directory to the location where you downloaded the package writing the following command in the terminal: MARKDOWN_HASH8844018ed0ccc8c506d6aff82c62c46fMARKDOWN_HASH

Then run this command to install the packages: MARKDOWN_HASH0452d2d16235c62b87fd735e6496c661MARKDOWN_HASH

Once the installation is successful you can close the terminal and remove the MARKDOWN_HASH1e681dc9c2bfe6538971553668079349MARKDOWN_HASH folder and its contents

Installation notes

Instances are stored at ~/.local/share/ubuntu-emulator –using the standard XDG_DATA_DIR location.

While an image upgrade feature is in the works, for now you can simply create an instance of a newer image over the previous one.

Running the emulator

The ubuntu-emulator tool makes it again really easy to manage instances and run the emulator. Typically, you’ll be opening a terminal and running these commands the first time you create an instance (where myinstance is the name you’ve chosen for it):

You can create any instances you need for different purposes. And once the instance has been created, you’ll be generally using the ubuntu-emulator run myinstance command to start an emulator session based on that instance.

Notice how in the command above the --arch parameter was specified to override the default architecture (armhf). Using the i386 arch will make the emulator run at a (much faster) native speed.

Other parameters you might want to experiment with are also: --scale=0.7 and --memory=720. In these examples, we’re scaling down the UI to be 70% of the original size (useful for smaller screens) and specifying a maximum of 720MB for the emulator to use (on systems with memory to spare).

There are 3 main elements you’ll be interacting with when running the emulator:

The phone UI – this is the visual part of the emulator, where you can interact with the UI in the same way you’d do it with a phone. You can use your mouse to simulate taps and slides. Bonus points if you can recognize the phone model where the UI is in ;)

The remote session on the terminal – upon starting the emulator, a terminal will also be launched alongside. Use the phablet username and the same password to log in to an interactive ADB session on the emulator. You can also launch other terminal sessions using other communication protocols –see the link at the end of this guide for more details.

The ubuntu-emulator tool – with this CLI tool, you can manage the lifetime and runtime of Ubuntu images. Common subcommands of ubuntu-emulator include create (to create new instances), destroy (to destroy existing instances), run (as we’ve already seen, to run instances), snapshot (to create and restore snapshots of a given point in time) and more. Use ubuntu-emulator --help to learn about these commands and ubuntu-emulator command --help to learn more about a particular command and its options.

Runtime notes

Make sure you’ve got enough space to install the emulator and create new instances, otherwise the operation will fail (or take a long time) without warning.

At this time, the emulator takes a while to load for the first time. During that time, you’ll see a black screen inside the phone skin. Just wait a bit until it’s finished loading and the welcome screen appears.

By default the latest built image from the devel-proposed channel is used. This can be changed during creation with the --channel and --revision options.

If your host has a network connection, the emulator will use that transparently, even though the network indicator might show otherwise.

To talk to the emulator, you can use standard adb. The emulator should appear under the list of the adb devices command.

Learn more and contribute

I hope this guide has whetted your appetite to start testing the emulator! You can also contribute making the emulator a first-class target for Ubuntu development. The easiest way is to install it and give it ago. If something is not working you can then file a bug.

I’ve just finished the last day of a week long sprint for Ubuntu application development. There were many people here, designers, SDK developers, QA folks and, which excited me the most, several of the Core Apps developers from our community!

I haven’t been in attendance at many conferences over the past couple of years, and without an in-person UDS I haven’t had a chance to meetup and hangout with anybody outside of my own local community. So this was a very nice treat for me personally to spend the week with such awesome and inspiring contributors.

It wasn’t a vacation though, sprints are lots of work, more work than UDS. All of us were jumping back and forth between high information density discussions on how to implement things, and then diving into some long heads-down work to get as much implemented as we could. It was intense, and now we’re all quite tired, but we all worked together well.

I was particularly pleased to see the community guys jumping right in and thriving in what could have very easily been an overwhelming event. Not only did they all accomplish a lot of work, fix a lot of bugs, and implement some new features, but they also gave invaluable feedback to the developers of the toolkit and tools. They never cease to amaze me with their talent and commitment.

It was a little bitter-sweet though, as this was also the last sprint with Jono at the head of the community team. As most of you know, Jono is leaving Canonical to join the XPrize foundation. It is an exciting opportunity to be sure, but his experience and his insights will be sorely missed by the rest of us. More importantly though he is a friend to so many of us, and while we are sad to see him leave, we wish him all the best and can’t wait to hear about the things he will be doing in the future.

Ever since we started building the Ubuntu SDK, we’ve been trying to find ways of bringing the vast number of Android apps that exist over to Ubuntu. As with any new platform, there’s a chasm between Android apps and native apps that can only be crossed through the effort of porting.

There are simple solutions, of course, like providing an Android runtime on Ubuntu. On other platforms, those have shown to present Android apps as second-class citizens that can’t benefit from a new platform’s unique features. Worse, they don’t provide a way for apps to gradually become first-class citizens, so chasm between Android and native still exists, which means the vast majority of apps supported this way will never improve.

There are also complicates solutions, like code conversion, that try to translate Android/Java code into the native platform’s language and toolkit, preserving logic and structure along the way. But doing this right becomes such a monumental task that making a tool to do it is virtually impossible, and the amount of cleanup and checking needed to be done by an actual developer quickly rises to the same level of effort as a manual port would have. This approach also fails to take advantage of differences in the platforms, and will re-create the old way of doing things even when it doesn’t make sense on the new platform.

NDR takes a different approach to these, it doesn’t let you run our Android code on Ubuntu, nor does it try to convert your Android code to native code. Instead NDR will re-create the general framework of your Android app as a native Ubuntu app, converting Activities to Pages, for example, to give you a skeleton project on which you can build your port. It won’t get you over the chasm, but it’ll show you the path to take and give you a head start on it. You will just need to fill it in with the logic code to make it behave like your Android app. NDR won’t provide any of logic for you, and chances are you’ll want to do it slightly differently than you did in Android anyway, due to the differences between the two platforms.

To test NDR during development, I chose the Telegram app because it was open source, popular, and largely used Android’s layout definitions and components. NDR will be less useful against apps such as games, that use their own UI components and draw directly to a canvas, but it’s pretty good at converting apps that use Android’s components and UI builder.

After only a couple days of hacking I was able to get NDR to generate enough of an Ubuntu SDK application that, with a little bit of manual cleanup, it was recognizably similar to the Android app’s.

This proves, in my opinion, that bootstrapping an Ubuntu port based on Android source code is not only possible, but is a viable way of supporting Android app developers who want to cross that chasm and target their apps for Ubuntu as well. I hope it will open the door for high-quality, native Ubuntu app ports from the Android ecosystem. There is still much more NDR can do to make this easier, and having people with more Android experience than me (that would be none) would certainly make it a more powerful tool, so I’m making it a public, open source project on Launchpad and am inviting anybody who has an interest in this to help me improve it.

Have you submitted your app for the App Showdown contest? With just under one week to go, there’s still time to enter and have the opportunity to win a Nexus/Meizu device with your app running on the handset. Deadline for submissions is Wednesday 9th April, 2014.

Here are the details once again:

The contest is open to everyone. The four dedicated categories that you can enter:

QML: original apps written in QML or those with a combination of QML and JavaScript/C++

HTML5: original apps written using web technologies, be it pure HTML (and CSS/JavaScript) or with platform access using Apache Cordova

Ported: apps ported from another platform, regardless of the technology used

Chinese apps: apps in this category will have to be original and specific to China and the Chinese culture. They will be judged by three native experts in our jury.

I’ve been using Ubuntu on my only phone for over six months now, and I’ve been loving it. But all this time it’s been missing something, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then, Saturday night, it finally hit me, it’s missing the community.

That’s not to say that the community isn’t involved in building it, all of the core apps have been community developed, as have several parts of our toolkit and even the platform itself. Everything about Ubuntu for phones is open source and open to the community.

But the community wasn’t on my phone. Their work was, but not the people. I have Facebook and Google+ and Twitter, sure, but everybody is on those, and you have to either follow or friend people there to see anything from them. I wanted something that put the community of Ubuntu phone users, on my Ubuntu phone. So, I started to make one.

Community Cast

Community Cast is a very simple, very basic, public message broadcasting service for Ubuntu. It’s not instant messaging, or social networking. It doesn’t to chat rooms or groups. It isn’t secure, at all. It does just one thing, it lets you send a short message to everybody else who uses it. It’s a place to say hello to other users of Ubuntu phone (or tablet). That’s it, that’s all.

As I mentioned at the start, I only realized what I wanted Saturday night, but after spending just a few hours on it, I’ve managed to get a barely functional client and server, which I’m making available now to anybody who wants to help build it.

Server

The server piece is a very small Django app, with a single BroadcastMessage data model, and the Django Rest Framework that allows you to list and post messages via JSON. To keep things simple, it doesn’t do any authentication yet, so it’s certainly not ready for any kind of production use. I would like it to get Ubuntu One authentication information from the client, but I’m still working out how to do that. I threw this very basic server up on our internal testing OpenStack cloud already, but it’s running the built-in http server and an sqlite3 database, so if it slows to a crawl or stops working don’t be surprised. Like I said, it’s not production ready. But if you want to help me get it there, you can get the code with bzr branch lp:~mhall119/+junk/communitycast-server, then just run syncdb and runserver to start it.

Client

The client is just as simple and unfinished as the server (I’ve only put a few hours into them both combined, remember?), but it’s enough to use. Again there’s no authentication, so anybody with the client code can post to my server, but I want to use the Ubuntu Online Accounts to authenticate a user via their Ubuntu One account. There’s also no automatic updating, you have to press the refresh button in the toolbar to check for new messages. But it works. You can get the code for it with bzr branch lp:~mhall119/+junk/communitycast-client and it will by default connect to my test instance. If you want to run your own server, you can change the baseUrl property on the MessageListModel to point to your local (or remote) server.

Screenshots

There isn’t much to show, but here’s what it looks like right now. I hope that there’s enough interest from others to get some better designs for the client and help implementing them and filling out the rest of the features on both the client and server.

Not bad for a few hours of work. I have a functional client and server, with the server even deployed to the cloud. Developing for Ubuntu is proving to be extremely fast and easy.

Yesterday we made a big step towards developing a native email client for Ubuntu, which uses the Ubuntu UI Toolkit and will converge between between phones, tablets and the desktop from the start.

We’re not starting from scratch though, we’re building on top of the incredible work done in the Trojitá project. Trojitá provides a fast, light email client built with Qt, which made it ideal for using with Ubuntu. And yesterday, the first of that work was accepted into upstream, you can now build an Ubuntu Components front end to Trojitá.

None of this would have been possible without the help up Trojitá’s upstream developer Jan Kundrát, who patiently helped me learn the codebase, and also the basics of CMake and Git so that I could make this first contribution. It also wouldn’t have been possible without the existing work by Ken VanDine and Joseph Mills, who both worked on the build configuration and some initial QML code that I used. Thanks also to Dan Chapman for working together with me to get this contribution into shape and accepted upstream.

This is just the start, now comes the hard work of actually building the new UI with the Ubuntu UI Toolkit. Andrea Del Sarto has provided some fantastic UI mockups already which we can use as a start, but there’s still a need for a more detailed visual and UX design. If you want to be part of that work, I’ve documented how to get the code and how to contribute on the EmailClient wiki. You can also join the next IRC meeting at 1400 UTC today in #ubuntu-touch-meeting on Freenode.

This work has been a LOT of fun. It started when we were trying to find the zen of each edge of the screen, a long time back. We quickly figured out that the bottom edge is by far the most fun, by far the most accessible. You can always get to it easily, it feels great. I suspect that’s why Apple has used the bottom edge for their quick control access on IOS.

We started in the same place as Apple, thinking that the bottom edge was so nice we wanted it for ourselves, in the system. But as we discussed it, we started to think that the app developer was the one who deserved to do something really distinctive in their app with it instead. It’s always tempting to grab the tastiest bit for oneself, but the mark of civility is restraint in the use of power and this felt like an appropriate time to exercise that restraint.

Importantly you can use it equally well if we split the screen into left and right stages. That made it a really important edge for us because it meant it could be used equally well on the Ubuntu phone, with a single app visible on the screen, and on the Ubuntu tablet, where we have the side stage as a uniquely cool way to put phone apps on tablet screens alongside a bigger, tablet app.

The net result is that you, the developer, and you, the user, have complete creative freedom with that bottom edge. There are of course ways to judge how well you’ve exercised that freedom, and the design guidance tries to leave you all the freedom in the world while still providing a framework for evaluating how good the result will feel to your users. If you want, there are some archetypes and patterns to choose from, but what I’d really like to see is NEW patterns and archetypes coming from diverse designs in the app developer community.

Here’s the key thing – that bottom edge is the one thing you are guaranteed to want to do more innovatively on Ubuntu than on any other mobile platform. So if you are creating a portable app, targeting a few different environments, that’s the thing to take extra time over for your Ubuntu version. That’s the place to brainstorm, try out ideas on your friends, make a few mockups. It’s the place you really express the single most important aspects of your application, because it’s the fastest, grooviest gesture in the book, and it’s all yours on Ubuntu.

Starting at 1400 UTC today, and continuing all week long, we will be hosting a series of online classes covering many aspects of Ubuntu application development. We have experts both from Canonical and our always amazing community who will be discussing the Ubuntu SDK, QML and HTML5 development, as well as the new Click packaging and app store.

We’re using a new format for this year’s app developer week. As you can tell from the link above, we’re using the Summit website. It will work much like the virtual UDS, where each session will have a page containing an embedded YouTube video that will stream the presenter’s hangout, an embedded IRC chat window that will log you into the correct channel, and an Etherpad document where the presenter can post code examples, notes, or any other text.

Use the chatroom like you would an Ubuntu On Air session, start your questions with “QUESTION:” and wait for the presenter to get to it. After the session is over, the recorded video will be available on that page for you to replay later. If you register yourself as attending on the website (requires a Launchpad profile), you can mark yourself as attending those sessions you are interested in, and Summit can then give you a personalize schedule as well as an ical feed you can subscribe to in your calendar.

Today we announced the start of the next Ubuntu App Showdown, and I have very high hopes for the kinds of apps we’ll see this time around. Our SDK has grown by leaps and bounds since the last one, and so much more is possible now. So go get yourself started now: http://developer.ubuntu.com/apps/

Earlier today Jono posted his Top 5 Dream Ubuntu Apps, and they all sound great. I don’t have any specific apps I’d like to see, but I would love to get some multi-player games. Nothing fancy, nothing 3D or FPS. Think more like Draw Something or Words With Friends, something casual, turn-based, that lets me connect with other Ubuntu device users. A clone of one of those would be fun, but let’s try and come up with something original, something unique to Ubuntu.

There’s been a lot of talk about Ubuntu’s phone and tablet development over the last year, and it’s great that it’s getting so much attention, but people have been getting the name of it all wrong. Now, to be fair, this is a problem entirely of our own making, we started off talking about the phone (and later tablet) developments as “Ubuntu Touch”, and put most of the information about on our wiki under a page named Touch. But there is no Ubuntu Touch! It’s not a separate OS or platform, there is only one OS and it’s simply called Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 14.04 Stack

What people are referring to when they say Touch or Ubuntu Touch, is really just Ubuntu with Unity 8. Other than the shell (and display server that powers it), it’s the same OS as you get on your desktop.

Everything under the hood is the same: same tools, same filesystem, even the same version of them, because it’s all built from the same source. Calendar data is stored in the same place, audio and video is played through the same system, even the Unity APIs are shared between desktop and phone.

So why is the name important? Not only is it more accurate to call them both Ubuntu, it’s also one of the (in my opinion) most exciting things about having an Ubuntu phone. You’re not getting a stripped down embedded Linux OS, or something so customized for phones that it’s useless on your desktop. You’re getting a fully featured, universal operating system, one that can do everything you need from a phone and everything you need from a desktop.

Future Ubuntu Stack

This is the key to Ubuntu’s convergence strategy, something that nobody else has right now. Android makes a terrible desktop OS. So does iOS. Chrome OS won’t work for a phone either, nor OSX. Even Microsoft has built two different platforms for mobile and desktop, even if they’ve slapped the same interface on both.

But with Ubuntu, once Unity 8 comes to the desktop, you will have the same OS, the same platform, on all of your devices. And while you will run the same version of Unity on both, Unity 8 is smart enough to change how it looks and how it works to meet the needs and capabilities of what you’re running it on. Better still, Unity will be able to make these changes at run time, so if you dock your convertible tablet to a keyboard, it will automatically switch from giving you a tablet interface to a desktop interface. All of your running apps keep running, but thanks to the Ubuntu SDK those too will automatically adjust to work as desktop apps.

So while “Ubuntu Touch” may have been a useful distinction in the beginning, it isn’t anymore. Instead, if you need to differentiate between desktop and mobile versions of Ubuntu, you should refer to “Unity 8″ if talking about the interface, or “Ubuntu for phones” (or tablet) if you’re talking about device images or hardware enablement. And if you’re a developer and you are talking about the platform APIs or capabilities, you’re talking about the “Ubuntu SDK”, which is already available on both desktop and mobile installs of Ubuntu.